Managing for Results

Do you expect yourself or your employees to achieve results or to do
tasks? There seems to be an eternal battle between the two worlds of
defined processes and delivering on results.

When interviewing managers – it is common for more than 80% of
managers to comment that they manage for results – but in interviewing
employees – the message is often quite different.

Is it the job of a manager to manage processes? Research is
increasingly showing that managers must have a clear understanding of
the outcomes that are expected and to communicate these and let people
self organise around how to achieve this. Processes are useful in
problem solving and capturing patterns and practices that may be used in
the organisation but that they must always be used as guidelines. So the
job of the manager is to expect results and to ensure that there are
adequate resources and processes to achieve this.

What managers often do is to give the task with exact instructions of
how it should be done – and then to expect that it be done in exactly
the way that it was outlined initially. When it is not done in the way
that was expected, then there are adverse consequences and they come
done like the proverbial “ton of bricks”. This is authoritarian
management and has been show to have a place in achieving results in
extreme emergencies. Achieving results in this way is not sustainable –
and demoralises individuals and teams and is often described as
micro-management.

There is another way! When you start building a picture of where we
want to be and give some guidance on how we might get there – people
have a natural ability and tendency to start working together to get
there. This self-organising principle is a powerful force in moving an
organisation forward. Looking at the most effective leaders in the world
– they map the capabilities that their organisations have and they start
motivating and inspiring those around them to change the situation and
move towards a central vision. Sure – there are still consequences when
results are not achieved, and individual accountability is still
essential – but there is a lot of power in collective effort.

To determine if you are measuring the process or the result it is
important to look at 4 core questions.

1. Are your measures based on how your teams do their work? If you
answer yes then you are measuring the process and not the results.
Actions and tasks are a means to an end and to a large extent the lowest
form of expectation you can have. Results are a much higher level of
expectation.

2. Is your measure, measurable? You may think that because the
measure that you designed is measurable that it measures a result. You
may define your goal as doing something once a month. The goal will be
“12 of these a year” and every month you may be proud of achieving that
goal. But just because it is measurable does not mean that it achieved
anything. Do you know if what you did had any impact? It is often easier
to measure parts of a process but just because it is measurable doesn’t
mean it is a result.

3. Is it an outcome or a milestone? Are you looking at a snapshot
during the process where you can measure your progress toward the end
result relative to where you started? If the answer is yes, then you are
looking at a result.

4. Did it change anything in the real world? A result changes
something in the real world. A result is not an intellectual construct
that gets created to make the manager happy. Results are real and
tangible changes that move people and organisations forward.

Every manager must learn to make this distinction. It isn’t as simple
as it might seem. There are significant benefits to managing results
rather than the process.

People have an amazing ability to figure out what they are going to
do for themselves. The task of the manager is to evaluate the results of
work and how they impact the bottom line. The task of the manager is
also to enable people to achieve better results by removing constraints
and enhancing the capabilities of organisations.

Another benefit is that your employees are much smarter when they own
their own results. The less you interfere with their processes, the more
your team has to own what they create. They have to take ownership of
their decisions and their risks. As a result, your employees are forced
to develop the capacity to be responsible for their own processes, and
this, in turn, frees up your time and attention so that you can take on
bigger and better things. In the longer term it also creates reflexive
thinking. That is that individuals and teams learn to think for
themselves and it is not highly dependent on only the skills of the
manager. Another critical benefit of measuring results rather than
processes is that it makes measurement impartial—the numbers speak for
themselves.

What about processes? Processes must always be measured against their
usefulness. What many organisations forget is that processes are a
codification of what works well, and is a statement of how different
people can and need to work together to get something done. Processes
are also very dynamic and need to be constantly improved to have any
use. Constant improvement implies daily improvement and in many cases we
need to look carefully at the value of a specific process to make sure
that it adds value. Processes should also largely be facilitated by
systems and we should use human effort to achieve results. When people
understand where they fit into the result of an organisation – they are
generally inspired and achieve more than when they are viewed as a pure
process block that has to complete labour.

One of the most challenging aspects of learning to manage is to learn
to distinguish between managing processes and managing for results. Your
own results will improve if you start focusing on the outcomes that you
need to achieve and asking yourself and those around you how we can
possibly get there. This collective agreement is then what we put into
action and measure. The transition to leadership is also much easier
when you have a clear view to an end goal and an eye on the impact that
we need to make through the results that we pursue.